Jon Iverson

Lots of all-in-one type digital music systems at CES this year, but this has to be one of the most simple and straightforward in purpose. You have a network ethernet port and a couple of USB inputs (for storage or flash drives) on the back and then left and right speaker posts. That's it, except for the power switch and plug of course.

I'm grouping these two rooms together since we didn't listen to Graham Nash's album in either one, but rather had each host pick something out. We were getting behind schedule, so the idea was to expose Nash to some completely different speaker technologies back to back and see what he thought.

Also on display in the LH Labs room was the long awaited VI DAC, also started as an Indiegogo project, and available shortly via normal retail for $4999 in solid state version, or $6999 with tubes sporting both single-ended or balanced outputs as shown here. Interestingly the tube version still contains the complete solid-state output stage, so you can switch between them.

The new No. 519 is intended to be an all-encompassing source for digital playback and will include not only a CD transport, but also Bluetooth, streaming, network playback, DAC, digital volume control and headphone amp. On the back are AES/EBU, SPDIF, optical and USB inputs as well as ethernet networking jacks. There are both balanced and unbalanced analog outputs as well AES/EBU, SPDIF and optical digital outputs.